Friday, August 5, 2011

Marvel RPG

One of the exciting announcements out of the 2011 GenCon is that Margaret Weis Productions have acquired the rights to produce roleplaying games set in the Marvel Universe. I suspect this could be based on either the comics and now the films. It will be fun to see how this plays out.

Margaret Weis Productions have been producing licensed games using their Cortex System since 2005 which was introduced in the Serenity RPG. A version of the Cortex System started way back with a game called Sovereign Stone and uses all the commonly used RPG dice (4 sided on up to 12 sided dice), each attribute's stat level is assigned a die- a 4 sided die being the lowest and 12 being the highest. The system has developed with each game that has been released using the system. The Battlestar Galactica setting was next including great improvements over the Serenity game system. There is also a generic rulebook with no setting intertwined. The latest license were Leverage and Smallville. These later Cortex releases have started to really veer away from typical game stats and skills, expanding new directions for semi-mainstream games. This is a rather bold step outside the box of typical or norm. I look forward to seeing where Cortex will lead us with Marvel.

The original TSR Marvel RPG (FASRIP) was the very first game we got into.